Ernst & Young LLP (EY), an assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services company, on Monday opened its second cyber forensics and e-discovery centre in India at Hyderabad, with the first being in Mumbai.
“The new advanced lab, set up with an investment of $5 million (approximately Rs 30 crore), will undertake complex cyber forensic and compliance-related investigations for clients in the US, the UK and in India across verticals including oil and gas, utilities, pharma and auto sectors,” Arpinder Singh, partner and national leader (fraud investigation and dispute services), EY, told mediapersons.
The Hyderabad lab employs 35 forensic technology specialists. EY is looking at expanding this centre to 80 specialists in due course and ramp up the headcount to 200 over the next five years, he added.
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“Rapid digitisation, over-dependence on technology and increasing business complexities are redefining the fraud landscape. The threats around cyber crime and cyber security have become a global menace, striking corporation across the board and disrupting operational processes and efficiencies,” Singh said.
According to a recent report published by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, cyber crime costs the global economy around $445 billion every year, with damage to business from theft of intellectual property exceeding $160 billion lost by individuals due to hacking.
EY, in its global FDA (forensic data analytics) survey 2014 said 60 per cent of Indian companies used FDA in their anti-fraud and anti-bribery programmes and a majority of them used a combination of in-house and outsourced resources.
However, while companies may be executing some forms of FDA, many are missing important opportunities to leverage more refined tools.
Advanced technologies that incorporate data visualisation, statistical analyses and text-mining concepts — as opposed to spreadsheets or relational database tools — can be applied to massive data sets from disparate sources and enable companies to ask new compliance-related questions about their data, which they did not previously question, the survey report said.
“With the demand for specialised forensic solutions expected to soar, we believe that our Hyderabad lab will be instrumental to assist organisations in their effort to detect and prevent frauds,” Singh said.
Speaking on the occasion, Telangana IT and Panchayat Raj minister KT Rama Rao said cyber crime (including harassment and economic fraud) in India had grown 120 per cent in 2013 over the previous year.
“A Delhi High Court report pegged cyber crime loss in India at $4 billion,” he said, adding such labs should definitely work with regulatory authorities and the police in curbing this growing menace.
